F4E Antenna in Cadarache

It has been almost one year since the F4E Antenna started taking shape. Under the supervision of Laurent Schmieder, Head of Site, Buildings and Power Supplies Division, the team he manages brings together a taskforce of engineers whose core mission is to ensure the timely construction of the ITER buildings and infrastructure.

By the end of the year the team will grow to 15 members and it will have the titanic task of managing roughly 500 engineers, technicians and workers working on the site.  For Schmieder, whose track record includes the AIDA project in Siberia and the Laser Megajoule in Bordeaux, this task is business as usual but putting together the team and integrating its members in the cycle of the project while splitting his time between Barcelona and Cadarache has been a real challenge. “Building the team and delivering in parallel is not easy. F4E had to follow up negotiations with ITER IO for the Procurement Agreements, proceed with contracts linked to the site management, select engineering consortia to go ahead with the design activities and approve the layout and construction of the first building to host F4E staff to which we moved on 7 June. The team had to be instantly integrated into the project”.

The signature of the PF Coils building signaled the beginning of construction play for the F4E Antenna. The building will house one of ITER's biggest components, the coils for the Poloidal Field (PF) magnets made out of niobium-titanium (Nb-Ti), which will be wound there. Such facility on site is necessary as the PF coils measure 24 metres in diameter and are simply too big to be transported and delivered to ITER.

The real big milestone though came with the signature of the Architect Engineer contract, one of the biggest contracts in this field ever awarded in Europe, which represents a total of around 1,700,000 hours of work, spread over the 8 years foreseen for the design and the construction of ITER buildings. This contract will assist F4E during the entire construction process as well as the site infrastructures and the distribution of the power supplies.  

The stakes were raised once again through the signature of the in kind Procurement Agreement between F4E and ITER IO for the construction of the 38 buildings, according to which Europe officially undertook the responsibility to deliver the construction of all ITER buildings.

With French public authorities giving the green light for excavation of the Tokamak building to begin in mid-July and the with more than 170 engineers and CAD designers arriving on the site by this autumn, the activity on the ground is bound to be groundbreaking.